How to Avoid Spending Too Much on Hosting

If you are new to purchasing a web hosting package, it can be very confusing to figure out exactly what you need and more importantly, what you don’t need. Many beginners end up overspending for their hosting accounts and have a lot of features included that they will never use. We’ll provide some basic guidelines that will help you on your search to ensure that you get exactly what you need at a price you can afford.

First, if you plan on running a small personal or business website, you will not need a hosting package that offers a very large amount of disk space. While this can be very attractive at first, you may be better served by finding a cheaper hosting package with a lot less space. The average site takes up less than 10 megs of disk space, unless you plan on hosting a number of pictures or sound files. Having a 1000 megs of disk space to play with is appealing, but is usually unnecessary for smaller sites.

On the same token, data transfer, one of the most expensive aspects of running a site, is often overestimated by webmasters of small sites. Again, if you are simply running an informational site that is not very large, your amount of data transfer or bandwidth will not be very much per month. The average small site uses much less than 500 megs of transfer every month. Don’t get conned into paying extra for bandwidth you may never use.

If you don’t plan to use a shopping cart, or other ecommerce features, purchasing a hosting package that offers these may be overkill. If you don’t plan to use a feature within the next six months, or even within the next year, it is definitely overkill to purchase a hosting package that includes these features.

There are many basic, budget hosting companies that offer lesser amount of features for a lot less money. If you don’t plan on running any special applications on your site, a basic hosting package should be more than sufficient.

The most important thing to remember while searching for a new hosting company is that is vital to compare these hosts side by side. Once you do this, you can narrow down the field to see which hosts charge the least amount of money for the features you do need, and you can ignore the hosting packages that offer too many features for a lot more money.

Even if your site does need a wide variety of features, you can still benefit by comparing several hosts before making your final decision. Try to find the top five hosts that offer the most amount of the features you need for the least amount of money. With a little research, you’ll end up with a site that has exactly what you need without having to pay extra for needless frills.